Inside EVE Online's Homegrown Media Apparatus

Andrew Groen is a real person. At least, I assume he is. I've only heard his voice as I called him on Skype about his work. I trust that his tales of writing about space battles are rooted in reality. But let me warn you that what he does is a bit bonkers.

Groen is an experienced journalist writing a non-fictional account of what players have done within the fictional world of Eve Online. Much of the work behind his book, The Great Empires of Eve Online, involves aligning the accounts, often fictional or exaggerated, behind the actions of real-life players within this fictional universe.

At some point, I realized that I, as a real person in the real world, was interviewing a real person writing about a fake world, who deals with real people telling fake stories about events that actually happened.

This was my introduction to the media landscape of Eve Online, a simulated world that has become a fully realized society, one so deep and so large that a kind of in-game news media has formed to tell the stories within the game.

The space-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game turns 12 this May 6. The game gives its player base, which includes more than 500,000 subscribers, the freedom to engage in space piracy, trade, warfare and diplomacy. The result is a universe as deep as any space opera, with massive space battles between ships, each piloted by a human with his (usually his) own motivations.

"Writing about a virtual universe like Eve can be immensely fun, because contrary to science fiction, it's an actual place," Groen said. "You can go there and send an Eve email to the main characters of the story. You can visit the star systems where the major battles took place. And at the same time, it's non-fiction, but the story is often being explicitly controlled by the players to make it as awesome as possible."

In addition to Groen, who's often described as the game's first historian, the sites Eve News24 and themittani.com both purport to give factual reports of the battles. There is even a "Galactic News Network," a video platform in the style of CNN.

Because it gives players agency to change the game world, and it because gives them a theme set around space exploration, the game attracts these kinds of reports, Eve creative director Torfi Frans Ólafsson said in a talk at Columbia University.

From the beginning, players reported on the events of the game on forums and on wiki sites, but these were usually biased celebrations of one's achievements, no better than tall tales at the bar. There was official lore, but Ólafsson said players were most interested in how fellow players were changing the game.

These reports tell stories about the time a character named Istvaan Shogaatsu abused the trust of the Ubiqua Seraph corporation to destroy every office and hangar they had. Or about the time a character named Jade Constantine responded to a declaration of war by the rival Taggart Transdimensional corporation with words, "Death to Taggart, Death to Ragnar, Death to the memory of this treacherous night."

These are stories of a growing world in which player's actions force others to respond. "The politics of Eve are forever in motion," Sam Timpson, a long time Eve player and a director of a larger pirate alliance, said. "Nothing in Eve happens for no good reason. You can trace back one battle today to the beginning of emerging powers in Eve more than a decade ago when it began."

Groen learned this as a journalist for the now-defunct Penny Arcade Report. What was on the screen at any point was almost beside the point. What drew him into the game was the players, the personalities he would follow as their fortunes rose and fell.

Reporting in the virtual world, however, is rife with the same problems as reporting in the real one, Groen said. Players are aware of the power of information and sanction rampant propaganda, and memories of virtual conflicts are as subject to human biases as memories of real ones. The comments on Eve news reports show how players like Timpson often do not trust Eve journalists to capture what actually happened.

That this is a real argument, and that Groen and others like him create a real replica of news, which is a replica of the real world, would bring a smile to Jean Baudrillard, author of Simulacra and Simulation. Baudrillard wrote on the idea of hyperreality, a false reality supplanting than the real world.

Disneyland, for example, aims to capture an idealized America that everyone knows does not exist, but over time people begin to accept the theme park version of a made-up, perfect America. Disneyland becomes a Magic Kingdom with its own authenticity within it. Baudrillard argued Disneyland reveals the way the rest of the world is also hyperreal.

"He argued that reality is itself in a process of being created," Maria Cecire, professor of media and literature at Bard College, said. "We use signs and symbols as a shorthand for reality, until ultimately they become our reality. The ways in which we engage with the world are generally constructed through imaginary conventions. But this doesn't make them any less powerful; they can have profound consequences."

For example, the news reports of Fox News and MSNBC are produced in the real world, but they are also, some would say, simulations of alternate realities. The battle of Republicans vs. Democrats is used as both a real and fictional framework, as are capitalists vs. communists or Band of Brothers vs. Goonsquad, two key factions in Groen's book.

Much of our modern world is already simulated, or mediated through screens. More than one billion people use Facebook, another fictional universe in which people play out fantasies of being their most attractive selves. What makes Eve Online so different?

More cosmically, why should the interaction between two groups of pixels on a screen be any less newsworthy than the interaction between two bodies of atoms colliding? Humans, by instinct, need stories to make sense of events, whether real or simulated. Realizing that, Groen said, is how he stays grounded in the wide universe of Eve Online.

"The best way to keep all of this confusing historo-philosophical stuff straight is to just forget that Eve's universe of New Eden isn't a real place," Groen, whose book will be available in late summer or early fall, said. "The same rules—besides death—apply there. And once you understand that, it's just like writing any other modern history with all the difficulties that implies."

Perfect Worlds is a series on Motherboard about simulations, imitations, and models. Follow along here.